Sofia knew they would never leave. Her mother said the Capital was the love of her life. She had come to the city for the first time when she was fifteen. Her own mother, Sofia’s grandmother, had thrown her father out of the country estate for cheating, so he went and purchased an enormous apartment in the Capital to feel good about himself.
Fifteen-year-old Clara went by train to visit his new apartment soon after. It was love at first sight. She realized immediately that this was where she was meant to be. She had always had a feeling she was in the wrong place. She felt ill at ease, but she had never understood why. But once she was in the city, she felt so in her own skin. She knew in that moment she should always trust her intuitions. If she did not feel right in a role, there was an alternative she was meant to seek out. She would never conform. Her father left Clara the apartment in his will. How could he not when she and the apartment so clearly belonged together?
When there was news of the army approaching the Capital, Clara was most worried about the apartment being taken away. She sat at the living room table, looking around. “They will want this apartment first. They can’t know how large it is. We can’t show them. They will come to see it. Because I am famous, they will think I have a beautiful apartment. I can’t bear the thought of one of those ignorant brutes living here. Imagine them eating with my spoons and farting on my couch?”
To Sofia’s delight, her mother announced they were going to the country to visit her grandmother, who still resided in the large rural childhood estate. Sofia jumped up and grabbed her book of folktales to read in the car.
“I wish you would read something more modern,” Clara said, looking at the book.
“I wish you would not criticize everything I do.”
“Good grief. You’ve become so contrary since the war. But I hear all the children are going quite mad. It ages children ten years.”
Clara often said she’d had high hopes for Sofia because she had begun to read so early. But then, unfortunately, she had never developed as a reader.
That she was reading a children’s book was particularly irksome. Clara liked to declare that she began reading serious philosophers when she was fourteen years old.
“Oh, Sofia, you can’t always read children’s books for the rest of your life. It will break my heart if you don’t grow as a reader. There’s so much out there for you to read and discover. Talking hares are a waste of time. They are there to amuse children. But they can’t really teach you about the world. The modern world, Sofia! Don’t you want to read books by living writers? With new ideas? Rational ideas? It’s through reading that I became an adult. You can’t learn anything in your enchanted forests.”
Throughout this entire diatribe, Sofia looked at her mother with a blank expression on her face. When she saw that her mother had finished what she was going to say, she calmly cast her eyes back to the pages of her book and continued to read it. She would continue to read, even were she to grow carsick.
She liked that her mother disapproved of this book. It was a way for her to feel as if her reading had nothing at all to do with her mother. Which was not an easy thing to do, considering how attached her mother was to everything literary in the country. How could Sofia look at books, any pile of books, and not feel a certain resentment towards them?
And in any case, Clara was wrong. Because Sofia had evolved as a reader. It was simply that she liked to read the same book over and over. When you reread a book multiple times, you begin to find secrets in the text. You can dip your toe in the book and feel the delightful cold of the subtext.
Whenever she started a new book, it would seem like she was in a stranger’s house. She was in an unfamiliar world. And she felt horribly uncomfortable.
She rather liked that no one else she knew had read the book of folktales. It had gone out of fashion. She liked the girls she met there. She felt connected to them. She was the girl in the stories.
You could prevail in this world, but you had to have pluck. She would open the book to find herself dressed in rags. And in a forest all alone. She was responsible for herself. Her family had caused her to be in her perilous state.
Mothers were never to be trusted. Many of the mothers in the tales had to give their daughters away. They had gone into debt. When their children were born, they were always spoken for. The mothers handed over their babies for gambling debts, for groceries, for clothes. For recipes and maps and keys.
Young girls who had been sent out into the world without a coin in their purse should not be judged for what they had to trade. The only thing they had were their babies.
These were the mothers whose intentions were good. The other mothers in the stories were wicked. They were mothers who lived for infanticide. They left their children in the woods for beasts to rip apart. They left them on cliffs for the weather to kill. They gave them to pirates with instructions to leave them in the sea. They gave them to hunters to slay as though they were beasts. They handed them over to travelling salesmen and told them to take them to the far reaches of the earth to abandon them.
It was then the little girl wandered around by herself. She met her true family. She encountered a blind child who could put people to sleep for a hundred years when she sang. She met a three-legged dog that was in love with a boy who beat him with a stick. But how can anyone control who they fall in love with? She met a donkey that could tell the future. But he could only foretell bad events. So he had been tied to a tree to keep him from walking up to women and telling them which of their children would never reach old age.
Sofia loved going to visit her grandmother’s home. It was enormous. You could not live in a place that sprawling in the city. The grounds around the house were characterized by a bohemian, fairy tale–like squalor. All the plants and flowers had been growing there for years. They had been there since her mother was a little girl.
The garden and the house had intermingled. There were rose branches that seemed to come right out of the bricks. If you were to pull the climbing vines off the house, it would fall apart. Birds had made nests under the gables of the house. The statues were covered in moss.
Her grandmother never paid attention to her mother the way other people did. She seemed oblivious to her daughter’s political leanings and her writings. Instead she treated Clara as though she were a young girl. And her mother began to act like a very young girl in the country. She sulked and complained. And she let everybody take care of her needs as though she were a child.
She never had anything good to say about her childhood. She was a polemicist. So she was either for or against specific topics.
“I have no idea how I grew up in that household and managed to be intelligent. I must be the first intelligent person born in that family in two hundred years. They are all so lazy. I can’t stand being around it.”
But Sofia didn’t find her grandmother lazy at all. Her grandmother seemed patient instead. She had time to show Sofia many things.
That day, they went into the greenhouse to plant together. They put on large hats with wide brims and large boots. Her grandmother gave her a pair of blue gardening gloves to protect her hands because there were flowers that bit. “Flowers are not peaceful. People think because they are so pretty, they must be kind. I once had a rose bush that was so angry all the time. It would attack my friends, but I didn’t know why. I think it was wicked, and there was nothing I could do about it. You have to cut their heads off or they don’t grow. Maybe that’s why they are so unkind. Look at these snapdragons. I plant them for the fairies.”
“Do you believe in fairies?”
“Of course. Who doesn’t? It’s only because you live in the city that you don’t see them.”
“What do they look like?”
“Much bigger than you would expect. They hang around in the summer, and they never wear shoes.”
Her grandmother had lunch brought out to a table in the garden. She had baked the cookies herself. The girl had assumed all pastries came from a bakery. There was a moss-covered statue of a boy, and water was trickling out of his penis. Time went slower at her grandmother’s house.
The house was meant to belong to her. Her grandmother said she would leave it to her. Her mother had inherited the apartment in the city, so it was only fair that she should inherit property too. Her grandmother was sure Clara would put the house up for sale. But now, of course, the Enemy would most likely seize the property, and it would no longer be in their family at all.
“I can’t bear the idea of it being lived in by a stranger. There are so many magical beings creeping around here. They would be hostile to a new owner. The beings know you. I am going to whisper to the tree creatures to protect you.”
“Please don’t,” said Sophia.
“Why ever not?”
“Because I don’t want to see a naked tree person. I would die of fright.”
“When they come, you will have already seen so much horror that they won’t be terrifying at all.”
“Still.”
Her grandmother stood up, leading Sofia to the edge of the woods. The house and garden were in a clearing. Despite being in a cloistered setting, the clearing was bright and airy, and was always bathed in a magnificent light. The light around the house became different colours during the day. It was white in the morning, greenish blue in the late afternoon. Then for a moment it turned pink before it became the colours of autumn and death, orange and red and yellow, like the dregs of orange juice that had sunk to the bottom of the glass. Sofia and her grandmother stood at the edge of the woods, looking at the trees together.
“There was once a tree that moved around in the woods,” her grandmother said as they inched forward. “There are trees that are like that. They aren’t really trees, though. They are a form of troll that looks like a tree. Their roots aren’t that deep. They tiptoe around in the forest at night.”
“Oh, how ghastly, Grandmother.”
“They can be quite dangerous. If you are sitting on the roots, they can pull themselves out of the ground and strangle you. They can stay in the same spot for years. They stay in the same spot for many, many nights. Then they tiptoe closer to the house.”
“How close do they come?” Sofia asked. “Please tell me they keep a respectful distance.”
“I once caught one reaching through the window, trying to get to your mother’s crib and snatch her out. They were always after your mother. I didn’t know why the woods thought she belonged to them. I was always arguing with them about it. Maybe she really did belong to them. She certainly doesn’t belong to me.”
If Sofia’s mother had been sitting with them, she would have told the grandmother to please stop talking nonsense. But she rarely sat with them. She went to her old room to write or read a book. Her mother found it hard to stay awake when they were in the country. The lack of stimulation made her feel as though she were already unconscious. Her body would turn itself off.
Once, they found her sleeping as though she had drunk a tiny glass of poison and collapsed. She was lying half off the couch with a book open on the ground. Although she was ordinarily a light sleeper, nothing woke her up in the country. She once told Sofia that there was nothing more physically exhausting than being bored. At the moment, there were two cats that had climbed up and were sleeping on her.
“Look into the forest. Look, really look. They will come out. The trees each have a spirit. Sometimes they sneak out of their trunks.”
“How do you know it wasn’t just a hunter looking for a deer?”
“You would never mistake a tree person for a hunter! You’d be much more likely to mistake one for a deer. They move in the same way. They are skittish. They move so quickly. They disappear like fleeting thoughts.”
The closer she was to the trees, the more her grandmother’s speech became magic. She believed, like the eldest citizens, that Elysians once spoke the language of the trees. Through time, however, the language became a more human-like one. But the trees understood every word of Elysian. And it was possible for them to whisper Elysian in your ear. The language had always been preserved specifically because of this connection to the trees.
So her grandmother spoke to the trees and asked them to take care of Sofia when the war came. For when Elysians asked the trees to hide them, the trees always would. When the children tried to climb them, they would lower their branches so they could get their footing. They offered companionship to children.
Before Elysians had their own country, they were punished for practising their religion. The Enemy regarded everything the Elysians did as slightly barbaric and grotesque. Even indecent. Their religion wasn’t a religion; it was witchcraft and superstition. It was embarrassing and infantile. It was overly sexual and celebrated the basest of human instincts. The Enemy had always had a problem with the sex in the Elysian culture.
There were rituals that had been banned as pornographic. There was one where young girls and boys ran around naked in the forest, wearing wreaths with leaves in their hair and waving their arms around like branches. They consumed psychedelic berries that made the branches of the trees writhe like snakes on Medusa’s head. Music was played. As soon as it stopped, the girls would rush to the nearest trees and fling their arms around them and pepper them with kisses.
In the summertime, girls would be dressed up in flouncy white dresses, and they would go down to the lake en masse to bob for apples. Their dresses would float up to the surface of the water, all around them, so that they would look, to a bird in the sky, like lily pads.
If they got an apple, it meant they would marry happily. If they didn’t, well, spinsterhood or a bad marriage was on its way. Her grandmother said when she was younger, a girl in the village had drowned herself, bobbing desperately for an apple. People in the village soothed themselves by saying that the girl was most likely going to be married to someone cruel.
Clara’s father had internalized the hatred towards the Elysians. He wanted nothing to do with anything traditionally Elysian. He refused to allow dishes with folkloric insignia on them. He despised when his wife told Clara folktales about the talking beasts in the woods.
He hated when Clara’s mother made offerings to the woods. And when she claimed that the woods were alive, and that the trees could protect or turn against you. He did everything to turn Clara against these beliefs.
He had every intention of sending Clara abroad to be educated, but then the Great War broke out. There was nowhere on the continent that was safe. For the first time in his adult life, he was forced to stay put. That was yet another reason why Clara remembered the war affectionately. She was able to spend it with her father. They were trapped inside the apartment together. She hadn’t even worried about the war and the bombings.
As Sofia and her grandmother headed back to the house, small cats, in the manner of wild hares, darted out of their way. Her grandmother had begun to allow a colony of feral cats to proliferate on her property. She had a different name for every cat in the house. And she never mixed up or forgot any of them.
Her grandmother was always having funerals for the cats. She loved them, but they were always dying tragic deaths that were, in many ways, her fault, though she never thought of these deaths that way. She closed a drawer while a cat was still inside. And it suffocated to death. She ran over a fair number of them in her car. Her grandmother never considered herself complicit in anything. Her grandmother considered herself to be the most innocent person on the planet. Because she had been cheated on by her husband, she was a tragic victim for the rest of her life.
“You know, I don’t think one cat can tell the difference between itself and all other cats. Every time it sees another cat, it thinks it is looking in the mirror. Some days it is more beautiful than it remembered. And some days it isn’t.”
“What if it sees itself being run over by a car in the street?” Clara asked without opening her eyes.
“I imagine it interprets it as something that happened in a dream.”
The cat was tearing a page out of the dictionary. It ran off with the page in its mouth. Sofia wondered which word it was looking for the definition of.
“What is that cat’s name?” Sofia asked.
“Charlebois. It’s the name of an army general. If I’d had a son, I was going to name him Charlebois or Napoleon. I wanted to give my child a courageous name.”
“Why didn’t you name me after Joan of Arc?” Clara said, sitting up and stretching.
“I named you after my mother.”
“Incredible. If I were a boy, I’d have been named after Alexander the Great. But since I’m a girl, I’m named after someone with arthritis.”
And unexpectedly, at least for Sofia, both women began to laugh.
Later in the afternoon, Sofia walked into the kitchen to find her mother and grandmother in a huge fight.
“You are all abandoning ship!” Clara cried. “You have no love for this country. Even if it is dying, why would you leave anybody on their deathbed? Is that the only thing you know how to do? If we all run off, there won’t be a country left.”
“You are staying here because you are important here. And you think you will be more important if you live through the war and experience all the horror of it. You will finally perhaps have the subject for a new book. Yes, I see that. But I think you should allow me to take Sofia with me. Even if it is just for a year. Until we are able to see how things are going.”
“You will use her as a hostage. You will use her to make me come after her. And if I don’t, you will tell her that I abandoned her. You will teach her that I am selfish and a whore. The way you did with my father to me. You are always trying to stop us from having lives. You will use any excuse to get us out of the Capital. Because you know the Capital represents happiness to us.”
“If you are going to stay in Elysia, you should both come stay here, where at least the tress will be able to protect and hide you. Or they will do their best to, in any case.”
“If you are so convinced that the trees will protect us, then why in the world are you leaving the country?”
“I am old. I have lived through one war, and I won’t do it again. I can’t live without my deliveries. I can’t bear the austerity anymore. I need my chocolates. I want to spend my last years feeling safe.”
“Do you know how it looks that my own mother is leaving the country? Especially when I have gone on the radio to tell people not to leave?”
“Who cares how anything looks when you are dead?”
“Uggh! I can’t stand it. No, I’m not allowing you to take my daughter with you. Because this country will need children when the war is over. We have so much hope in that generation. We have worked so hard to give them a country filled with art and philosophy and rational thinking. So they could be proud of where they came from. Not ashamed like I always was. Come on, Sofia. We are leaving. I will not let you be raised by this woman. She will make you old before your time.”
Sofia rushed around gathering her things. She wanted to get out as soon as possible. The longer she took, the more opportunity her mother had to launch insults at her grandmother. Sofia found it insupportable to listen to her grandmother be insulted. Her grandmother seemed to her the kindest woman in the world. That her mother was accusing her of being a monster was almost impossible to stomach. It was completely screwing with her sense of everything sacred.
Her mother took her hand and pulled her as she marched with determination to the car. Because her mother was wearing heels, it gave her the effect of wobbling back and forth like a sailboat in the wind. They got to the car. Sofia scrambled into the back seat. Her grandmother leaned in the doorway of the house.
Her mother got in the car. And just as soon as she sat down, she leapt up from the seat and jumped back out. She ran back to her mother and threw herself in her arms. Sofia watched in disbelief. Everything her mother was doing was completely strange and out of the ordinary.
Her grandmother held her as though she were a child. She patted her back and murmured, “You will be okay. We will all be okay. We will see each other again. Don’t worry about me. You know best. You have always known best. You have always understood the world so much better than me.”
“I love you, Mama. I am sorry for everything. I’m sorry if I wasn’t always there. I’m sorry if I seemed like a spoiled brat. I have always been a spoiled brat. But I love you so much, Mama.”
Clara let out a loud cry. Which was shocking to Sofia. As she had very rarely heard her mother be upset or emotional in that way. Then Clara pulled herself from her mother. She ran to the car, her face covered in tears. She climbed in the car and looked straight ahead, ready to pull away from the house without looking again at her mother, as though it would kill her to see her again.
Clara didn’t speak another word until they were on the highway. Her face had returned to its former dignified nonchalance. “It’s a trap, that house. Every time I visit, she makes me feel as though I have to leave home all over again. I feel like a child again, and that I’m choosing my father over her. Mothers never forgive anything. Perhaps I owe her my success to some extent. It was by being the opposite of her that I became who I am.”
“Imagine if I said things like that about you!”
“It would be normal, I suppose.”
“You think you are a genius. And everything you do is more important than what anyone else does.”
Her mother opened her mouth and lifted her hands off the steering wheel—as if to protest what Sofia had just said. But then looked as though she couldn’t actually argue with what Sofia had just said.
“Oh so what?”
They both started laughing. Sofia put her hands over her mouth.